Probing to the heart of selfhood, Ricoeur finds otherness. In this eminent thinker's theory of personhood, the self is a character-narrator of its own history, its autonomy intimately bound up with solicitude for one's neighbors and with justice for each individual. Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, Ricoeur reads life histories as literary narratives and attempts to show how practical wisdom should flow from our intuitive moral judgments of what the good life might be like. His ethics of reciprocity and caring draws freely on the whole of Western philosophy, from Plato, Aristotle and Greek tragedy to Heidegger, language theory and John Rawls. An exciting work for specialists and advanced students, this dense, difficult treatise, which cuts across philosophy, semantics, literary theory and social science, will daunt the general reader. (Oct.)